Sunday, May 4, 2008

"Palestinian Authority (PA) Chairman Mahmoud Abbas feels quite depressed these days, having been unceremoniously told by President Bush that the US administration won’t pressure Israel to halt Jewish settlement expansion nor commit itself to a total Israeli withdrawal from the Palestinian territories occupied in 1967.

Some of Abbas’s aides have described his recent visit to Washington as the “straw that broke the camel’s back.” Abbas himself described the visit as “a clear failure.” One Palestinian commentator from Ramallah labeled the visit “ a gigantic and monumental fiasco,” arguing that it amounted to a virtual breakdown of Abbas’s entire strategy of counting on the Bush administration to create a viable and contiguous Palestinian state, with East Jerusalem as its capital.

According to sources in Amman, Abbas informed Bush that he wouldn’t run for a second term as Chairman of the PA. One source quoted an aide to Abbas as saying that the chairman concluded his meeting with Bush by telling him “you can look for another donkey to preside over the Palestinian Authority.”........

I am saying “belatedly or too late” because Abbas nearly wrecked his relations with his own people, especially since the Gaza events of last year, all for the purpose of appeasing Bush and Rice and receiving from them a certificate of good conduct. He thought, out of naivety, ignorance, and weakness of character, that the neocons in Washington would award him for his subservience and obsequiousness by pressuring Israel to end the occupation and halt unrelenting theft of Palestinian land.

However, Abbas’s most scandalous blunder has been his uneducated conviction that the big liar of Washington, the man who invaded, occupied and destroyed two sovereign Muslim countries based on lies, would behave honestly and straightly with the Palestinians.

Now it would be very hard for Abbas to salvage his legacy by trying to undo or at least rectify some of the blunders he and his regime committed against the Palestinian masses and their enduring just cause, all in order to please Washington.

As Chairman of the PA, Abbas and his hangers-on abducted, detained, tortured and even killed political opponents in order to demonstrate Palestinian commitment to peace to the malicious duo of the US and Israel. This happened at a time when Israel continued to murder Palestinians in droves and grab more Palestinian land for Jewish settlement expansion. Abbas also readily accepted, even welcomed, naked American interference in Palestinian internal affairs to the point of allowing Washington to conspire in coordination with certain Palestinian security officials to corrode and overthrow the democratically elected government led by the Hamas movement.

More to the point, Abbas went as far as tacitly collaborating with Israel and the US in maintaining the Nazi-like blockade of 1.5 million Gazans, all in order to weaken Hamas.

I don’t really know if Abbas has the moral courage and intellectual honesty to say to Washington “enough is enough.” If he does, he should do it now, because tomorrow might be too late."

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The bastard should be tried for treason. He should not be let off the hook using the excuse that he was just naive. His treason went way beyond naivete, it was deliberate. Besides, he will not change course regardless of the results; this is typical of all stooges of the empire.